I think it’s a little hard to blame Tim here, DRM was happening with or without it being part of HTML. Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec, but as long as movie studios were requiring DRM, DRM was going to happen. If anyone railroaded it through, it would be Google, who owns Widevine, and via Chrome, basically can determine web standards with or without the W3C’s support, from a practical sense.
So the W3C has to accept DRM to prevent it being in a proprietary plugin, and Firefox had to also accept the DRM to avoid being “the browser that can’t play Netflix”, and everyone effectively has to go along with it to ensure they still have a seat at the table on the issue, but it all, at the end, comes back to the MPAA, which isn’t going to let you have a license to stream their content unless it is locked with DRM, regardless of how futile DRM actually is.
.. I think the following quote from Braveheart is awesome. The whole movie seems designed to turn the audience into William Wallace worshipers, except for this line, which causes an attentive viewer to stop and think:
“Admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage, so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”
Fat Protocols
by replicating and storing user data across an open and decentralized network rather than individual applications controlling access to disparate silos of information, we reduce the barriers to entry for new players and create a more vibrant and competitive ecosystem of products and services on top. As a concrete example, consider how easy it is to switch from Poloniex to GDAX, or to any of the dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges out there, and vice-versa in large part because they all have equal and free access to the underlying data, blockchain transactions. Here you have several competing, non-cooperating services which are interoperable with each other by virtue of building their services on top of the same open protocols.
.. the market cap of the protocol always grows faster than the combined value of the applications built on top, since the success of the application layer drives further speculation at the protocol layer
.. The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer. Many of the established rules about building businesses and investing in innovation don’t apply to this new model and today we probably have more questions than answers.
Why Facebook Is Really Blocking the Ad Blockers
But Apple’s entire mobile platform is built on closed-system apps, not Web-based sites. Ads served within these apps cannot be blocked by anything, not even Apple’s own ad blockers. So, by blocking Web-based ads, Apple’s move would, in theory, drive businesses away from the open mobile Web, where the future of advertising is shaky, and toward apps, where there are fewer business variables. It’s not a coincidence, either, that Apple makes money from apps through both sales and advertising, while it earns nothing from its mobile browser.
.. What was true of Apple then is even more true of Facebook now. Over the last few years, Facebook has seen rapid growth within its mobile app, where blockers don’t work and it can easily control the ad experience in the same way that Apple can control the app experience. This means that features of advertising that frustrate readers are gone (malware, surprise screen takeovers, unexpected noise), but some of it is still very much there (tracking, data collection).
Facebook has now shut down ad blockers on nearly all of its domain—first on mobile apps and now on desktops. (Blocking still works on the mobile Web.) This suggests to publishers that Facebook is a safe space where the business of content can be more effectively protected, on the condition that they submit to being Facebook’s vassals.
.. Individual publications, and even some publishers, lack the resources to mount an all-out arms race against ad blockers, not least because they’re unlikely to attract engineering talent
.. Facebook’s ability to protect its revenue stream on the desktop version of its site only strengthens its position as a closed platform, a place where the user is powerless against its technical domination and will be gently served ads, whether they like it or not. This makes it an extremely safe bet as a place for brands to publish content. Instant Articles, while not yet a success, got a deluge of publishers on board because the model seemed straightforward, reliable, and immune to ad-block tampering.